It’s that time of year when the blog REALLY goes off the boil.. I’m hardly Pepys at the best of times, but at the moment I’m struggling to get everything done I have to, let alone write on here.. Just got back from a fantastic few days back in Italy with the Unsound Crew…

.. which sadly may be the last one, at least in that location: whether you’ve got Geography GCSE and blame longshore drift or have a more eco-explanation for such things, either way the beach is fucked – at high tide a 1/3 of the breadth it was when we first went out there 2 years ago, as you can see below as literally of hundreds of UK and Italian ravers cram themselves onto a narrow band of sand..

It’s bad news for the Sunbound Unsound Parties, but much much worse for a local community that was already dying on its arse and is now losing even the little tourism it has..

This weekend it’s up to Newcastle – via Buxton – for the first long run in Truck, and a birthday party, and then on Wednesday we’re off to Glastonbury. Rumours of bad weather irk – aren’t we owed a decent one yet? – but there’s a good line-up, a million friends going and we don’t have to sleep in a tent anymore. Amidst all this, my company is moving offices too, to the Barbican.

We’ve got Truck. Well, van, but Truck sounds better and it has got an old CB radio in it, so I can relive my early teens as a bedroom breaker…

It’s not without its problems, Truck – currently lacks brakelights and headlights (not sure what that’s about), weighs 3 tonnes and is petrol rather than diesel. But it’s in lovely condition, has done comparatively few miles for a 20 year old vehicle (due to its past life as an airport ambulance) and means no more festival camping horror stories.

playing at this tomorrow – opening slot, 2pm, with lots of excellent eclecticism to follow. I’m probably going to play the kind of fucked up, speaker punishing dub nonsense I don’t normally get to play out. Kennington be warned.

Reading Under A Hoodoo Moon, an excellent autobiography by Mac “Dr John” Rebennack at the moment. It’s been co / ghostwritten but the flavour of the man definitely comes through, and it’s not always palatable. Rebennack is an intriguing character and he’s strong on what made the New Orleans sound, the origins of “fonk”, the major players.

It was published in the early 90s and I’m still in the mid-70s, before he started cleaning up, but the man’s had a hard paper-round. His obsession with music from an early age led him into some serious drug habits in his teens and prison in the early 60s, and along the way he did some pretty unpleasant stuff (pimping, violence, fraud etc). It does give him an interesting perspective on things – he saw a lot of the 60s debauchery and twattery by the likes of the Stones and the Who first hand, and was very dismissive – he thought it was just try-hard rich kid eccentricity (he’d also been on the wrong end of police interest for long enough to believe you never carried more drugs than you could eat, so bowls of coke and big bags of weed at parties made him anxious).

He’s also quite strong on mish-mash of spiritual traditions in New Orleans – Catholicism, santeria, voodoo, gris-gris, orisha and the rest – at one point, running Dr John’s Temple of Voodoo for some of the community. I could have used a little more of this, but it’s still of interest.

But the book’s key strength is in the portrayal of his early years – his teens and twenties in New Orleans before the Feds sucked the life out of it and the talent fled and before Rebennack got too fucked up. The constantly rotating bands, the endless gigs, the fusions of styles, the drag queens and dealers andgangsters and brass bands and voodoo mystics and the rest that make me pine for the chance to have been there, rough as it was. He tells a great story about the lack of respect for segregation / Jim Crow laws in the city, and how two adjacent venues, one purportedly white, the other black, would see the members of the night’s band swap, member by member, during the set (they simply ran from one venue to the other, mid-song) until each venue had a completely different band to the one they’d started out with.

Well worth a read, and I’d recommend digging out your Dr John, Professor Longhair, Huey Piano Smith and Meters records while you read it too.